by Judy Handley | Sep 2, 2010 | Madagascar, Sailing Logs Year 5 |
Day 311, Year 5 Quiet Sakatia Day
Date: Thursday, September 2, 2010
Weather: Partly Cloudy Morning, Clear & Windy Afternoon
Location: Nosy Sakatia, NW Madagascar
Finally, a quiet day. We have been having too much fun the past few days and it was time for a rest. I re-wrote all of the emails I lost yesterday and that took all morning. Mark went up to Sakatia Towers to see John and to make arrangements to go to town with him tomorrow. John called the Hell-ville computer guru for Mark and made an appointment for 8 am. Mark spent much of the remainder of the day trying to find out what is infecting the files on his computer, but he was unsuccessful. This computer virus is quite tricky, but hopefully tomorrow’s trip to town will finally solve the problem. But even with all the problems, we were able to get online this morning, albeit briefly, and get an update on Hurricane Earl. What we read this morning indicated that it is picking up steam and heading north along the east coast of the US. Our daughter wrote and said they are expecting Earl to hit Cape Cod on Friday night. I sure hope something happens to send this guy out to sea before it gets that far north.
We spent much of our afternoon underwater. Low tide was mid-afternoon and it wasn’t as clear as usual, but we still enjoyed the sights. I saw a new wrasse today with the most beautiful turquoise and pink coloring. And I was able to finally get a photo of the juvenile phase of the Blunthead Platax. The adult Blunthead is commonly called a batfish, a type of spadefish, that loves to live around anchored yachts in Chagos and eat all the garbage thrown overboard. They are a flat fish as big as a dinner plate. The juvenile is all head with a very long fin going up and a another very long fin going down and then two smaller fins extending downward from just under its mouth. I had the underwater camera today and was practicing, so my photos of this fish are not as good as they would have been had Mark been doing the photography, but at least I now have a picture of it. We also saw the beautiful juvenile phase of the Imperor Angelfish today, so it was a successful snorkel. And just as we got in the dinghy to return to Windbird, we saw hump-backed dolphins in the anchorage. So it was a good day.
by Judy Handley | Sep 1, 2010 | Madagascar, Sailing Logs Year 5 |
Day 310, Year 5 One Fish, Two Fish, Big Fish, Little Fish
Date: Wednesday, September 1, 2010
Weather: Partly Cloudy, Clearing in the Afternoon
Location: Nosy Sakatia, NW Madagascar
At 6:15 am Mark, Ed from Constance, and Nick from Muneera left on Dream Catcher with Barry and his two eldest sons, Michael and Bradley for a day of fishing. While the fishermen were out and about, Tina and her daughter Candice and son Devon of Dream Catcher, and Andrea and her daughters Millie and Ella of Muneera hung out on the beach. I spent the four morning hours writing long overdue emails, and when I put them on a memory stick and put that in Mark’s computer to send them, they somehow lost their formatting and became digital gibberish. I do this every day and just can’t figure out how this could have happened. I could have cried, but instead I went to the beach and joined the crew there and just enjoyed the afternoon.
Mid-afternoon the fishermen returned with one huge Trevally, two big Spanish Mackerels. They caught a few small fish, and one huge Sailfin (like a Marlin) that was so big that it got away after making a show by skipping over the water on it’s tail. The fishermen also saw at least seven whales, three pairs and a single. So it was a good day out on the water.
We went to Pioneer to have dinner with Bruce, Nadine, and their seven year-old daughter Tristen. Bruce put some of the fish from the marathon fishing event on the grill and we ate and made plans for our trip north in the next couple of days. Tomorrow we will either stay here and prepare to leave on Friday or Saturday or we will head to Hell-ville in the boat to have the computer scanned for problems one more time and then we will head north. In either case, we should be in Nosy Mitsio by Saturday or Sunday.
by Judy Handley | Aug 31, 2010 | Madagascar, Sailing Logs Year 5 |
Day 309, Year 5 Baksheesh!
Date: Tuesday, August 31, 2010
Weather: Overcast with Occasional Drizzle
Location: Nosy Sakatia, NW Madagascar
The September edition of Cruising World has an article in it by Fatty Goodlander. It is called “Baksheesh!” and is all about our good friends Robert and Tina of Shirena. Baksheesh is the term for the under the table “gifts” you have to give officials in Egypt and other parts of that part of the world. If you can get a copy of the September Cruising World you can read the article to find out how the whole experience got to be just a little too much for Fatty. If you have been following this log, you probably remember that Robert had a heart attack in Egypt. Robert is Zbyszek Wasilewicz but always introduces himself as Robert. His reasoning is that Zbyszek is just too difficult for people to remember. We spent Christmas and New Year’s with Robert and Tina in Thailand this year and when we had a farewell dinner on New Year’s Day I gave Robert a bottle of wine called Robert’s Rock. I told him if he made it through the Gulf of Aden he was to drink the wine and that we would start calling him by his real name. Shirena made it, so we now call him Zbyszek. But in the article Fatty calls him Robert so I will continue to call him that here. On January 2, Shirena sailed out of Patong Beach and headed for Uligan in the Maldives and then for Salalah in Oman. At that time, none of us would ever have dreamed that Robert would have a serious heart attack in just a few months. As Fatty describes the situation in Egypt in the Cruising World article we relived the whole horrible time again. Fatty and Carolyn Goodlander on Wildcard and Tom and Nicolette Samson on Katanne were ahead of Robert and Tina and were already in Israel. After Robert’s heart attack Fatty and Tom flew back to Egypt to sail Shirena to Israel, but the trouble they had with officials in Egypt is what the article is all about. At this time, Shirena is still in Israel and Robert and Tina are back home in Australia. They do hope to be back cruising next season, but I know they won’t be returning to Egypt. The picture Fatty paints of Egypt’s officials is not a pretty one. Reading the article made me even happier about our decision to come south.
Here on Windbird, the oven has been on nonstop since 10 am and because of the drizzle we have had to keep the all the hatches closed. So its about 89 degrees F in here-not as hot as it was the whole time we were in India, but hotter than we have been used to recently. I baked two loaves of banana bread, two loaves of wheat bread, baked two chickens we bought in town yesterday, and then baked the potatoes, onions, and carrots to go with the chicken. Unfortunately the largest baking pan I have will hold two chickens but nothing else, so the chickens have to bake and then the veggies go in. This makes the cooking a long, drawn out process but the smells are scrumptious. Mark has spent the day working on this computer. It is not fixed so it is another long, drawn out process. We have been able to get mail and get online, sort of, but with online searches we get text only and no pictures, and sometimes we get nothing. Also, his Excel Spreadsheet program will not open. So he will continue to try and figure out what is going on. At some point, we will have to return to Hell-ville and stay there until the problem is fixed. In the meantime, our connection to the internet is tenuous at best, and needless to say, Mark is a bit frustrated.
This afternoon Bruce and Nadine of Pioneer returned to the anchorage and a boat we haven’t met before, Muneera, arrived. Nick and Andrea are the young couple on Muneera and they have two little girls. We talked to Bruce and Nadine on Pioneer briefly and they proposed that we head north with them in the next couple of days. We will talk to them again tomorrow about this but are seriously considering the proposal. We went to Dream Catcher for sundowners tonight with Barry and Tina and Nick and Andrea of Muneera. We had a fabulous evening sharing sailing experiences. Tomorrow Barry is taking the ‘boys’ out for a fishing expedition. At 6 am I will take our dinghy and Mark and pick up Ed on Constance and Nick on Muneera and deliver them to Dream Catcher. Since Tina and her daughter Candice will not be going on Dream Catcher, they are headed to Constance for early morning coffee. Then we will decide if the ‘girls’ will have an organized day of play as well. I like Tina’s idea of taking a book, a beach umbrella, and snorkeling gear to the beach. We can then read and snorkel our way through the day.
by Judy Handley | Aug 30, 2010 | Madagascar, Sailing Logs Year 5 |
Day 308, Year 5 Weather & Shop ’til You Drop.Again
Date: Monday, August 30, 2010
Weather: Rain Early Morning and Late Afternoon
Location: Nosy Sakatia, NW Madagascar
What is going on with the weather? This is the dry season in Madagascar and we should never be getting rain during the day according to the locals. But we are. The dry season was supposed to be cooler than it has been, but it was not and already they say it is getting warmer. I have no proof of that as I am always hot, so I’ll just take their word for it. Nandipo is a restaurant in Hell-ville that is the meeting place of expats and sailors in this area. We were there today and they were saying that the northerlies are coming in already, a couple of months too soon. I don’t know if any of this will have any impact on our trip to South Africa, but it is a familiar tune. When we crossed the Pacific in the summer of 2006 we did not have the southeast trade winds that we were supposed to have. In fact, we have not had typical weather during any of the five years of our circumnavigation, so we have just decided that there is really no such thing as typical weather. But then maybe global warming has something to do with this. Something that is expected is hurricanes in the Atlantic at this time of year and we hear that Hurricane Earl could go north parallel to the East Coast of the US. We just hope that it doesn’t pick up steam and that if it does go north that it is far off-shore.
We went to Hell-ville today to take Mark’s computer in to try and get rid of the virus that has been with us for the past month and to do some shopping. We went in with John of Sakatia Towers and between us we had ten HEAVY cases of Three Horses Beer bottles to return. These bottles hold the equivalent of two normal beers, but the glass is super thick and the plastic cases are even thicker. John also had two bottles of propane to be refilled and we had two five gallon fuel jugs, so getting all of this into Anatole’s (John’s driver) small car was almost comical. But we made it. We dropped off our empty beer cases and our food orders at Ah-Kam Oliver’s and headed on into town. Oliver’s is a little Chinese shop that does an incredible business. Prices are better than at the SuperMarche in town so it is always overrun with people. By leaving the order, Oliver can then gather the things when he has a breather and has the goods and the bill ready when we return a couple of hours later. We then went on into town. Mark went to the computer shop and John and I went to the bank. Then John and I split up but before long, we all ended up at Nandipo. The computer shop had taken Mark’s hard drive out and was scanning it for virus problems and that was going to take most of the day. So we had to decide whether to leave the computer and return tomorrow or stay until late afternoon. We opted for the latter, but we had to figure out what to do with the huge load of groceries we had ordered at Oliver’s. John had an even bigger order, so I went with Anatole to pay for our order and we put everything in the back of a truck and sent it out to Chanty Beach to be carted over to Sakatia Towers. I couldn’t believe it, but between John’s order and ours plus our fuel cans and his propane tanks we filled the entire back of a small truck. That done, I returned to Nandipo. I had seen Peter and Carla of Odulphus walking on the street when I was with Anatole, so we sent them a text message to see if we could get together for lunch. We didn’t hear back from them right away, so we wandered up the street to find a restaurant John had recommended. We found the sign and were on the street looking at it when we heard Peter and Carla yell at us from the second floor. They were just in the process of sending a text message back when they saw us on the street. This, plus the fact that we knew four of the other five customers in the restaurant illustrates that Hell-ville is really a small town and we have been here long enough to know more people than we should.
We ate and talked and waited for the shops to re-open at 3 pm. Mark then returned to the computer shop, I did the super market and fresh market shopping, and we hooked up with Ann Christine, the woman who started the school on Nosy Sakatia, and we hired a taxi together to take us back to Chanty Beach. From there, John’s motor boat met us laden with our purchases from Oliver’s and we returned to Windbird. We now have most things put away and are getting ready to eat a late dinner. It was a busy day, but a good one. We have much of the shopping done for our trek to South Africa and we seem to have a computer that works and allows us to get on the internet. So once again, life is good. Tomorrow we will stay close to home, bake bread, do some cooking, and visit with Dream Catcher and Constance to discuss plans for our trip south.
by Judy Handley | Aug 29, 2010 | Madagascar, Sailing Logs Year 5 |
Day 307, Year 5 Sunday Lunch at Sakatia Towers
Date: Sunday, August 29, 2010
Weather: Another Beautiful Day with Light Winds
Location: Nosy Sakatia, NW Madagascar
Today was a free and easy Sunday. We went snorkeling in search of nudibranchs. We found none but we had a great snorkel, catching the tide at just the right time to have good clarity. The big find for today was a juvenile Semicircle Angelfish. We saw an adult in the Bay of Islands in Fiji but have never seen another. The adult is large with blue, green, and yellow coloration and is not particularly spectacular. But the juvenile is dark blue with white lines that begin at the nose as vertical lines and then begin to curve until they are crescent-shaped near the tail. I saw a larger juvenile while snorkeling here a couple of weeks ago but we didn’t have the camera with us. Today we were able to get a photo of this beautiful little fish.
We had lunch on the Sakatia Towers deck with seven of John’s guests, Ed and Lynne of Constance, Claude, Aileen, and John (a visitor) of Koukouri and John, and Bruce and Bierget of Irene from South Africa and a couple visiting them from South Africa. Two of John’s guests are Australians that are leaving here and heading to Africa to climb Kilimanjaro, another young woman traveling alone from Switzerland, a couple I didn’t meet, and then an older couple that just arrived from South Africa who were very good friends of John’s parents and have known John for many years. So it was a wonderful mix of people with great food.
Tomorrow we go to Hell-ville by taxi to take Mark’s computer in to try and get rid of the virus that has been a problem for weeks now. We’ll do a little shopping and then return. At some point tomorrow, we hope to make a decision on what we are doing with the last three weeks we have here in Madagascar. One thing is for sure. We need a couple of days of down time as we have been partying nonstop since Friday. It’s a tough life but somebody’s got to do it!
by Judy Handley | Aug 28, 2010 | Madagascar, Sailing Logs Year 5 |
Day 306, Year 5 Proud Parents
Date: Saturday, August 28, 2010
Weather: Beautiful Day; SE Winds Light, PM Sea Breeze Strong
Location: Nosy Sakatia, NW Madagascar
Today our daughter’s blog went public. Here’s part of the press release that went about this: “We’re proud to announce that WGBH’s Cape Cod affiliate, WCAI, was selected as one of 12 pilot NPR (National Public Radio) stations that will curate and distribute online content about high-interest, specialized subjects. In the case of WCAI, the topic of interest is oceans and global climate change, and the reporter chosen to lead the effort after a nationwide search is WCAI’s own science reporter/editor Heather Goldstone, who has a PhD in marine biology from MIT and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Goldstone’s task for Argo is to write and curate a daily blog on the WCAI website that will provide original reporting on all matters involving the ocean and climate change – from the very latest on the mammoth BP oil spill to shifting weather patterns to what’s going on miles below the ocean surface. Goldstone is also tasked with creating a one-stop-shopping online resource on global climate change and related topics, and will develop and lead an online community of concerned citizen-readers in discussions related to the issue.” We were able to get online yesterday just long enough to take a look at the blog site and we were very impressed. We know how Heather has struggled to find child care and start working much sooner than she expected to. But this was an opportunity she just couldn’t pass up. We talked to her late this afternoon to tell her how very proud we are of what she has accomplished in the last month to get the site up and running. She has wonderful support from NPR and that has certainly helped. So congratulations, Heather. We are very proud of your accomplishments.
We started our morning with a Sakatia snorkel. We were hoping to see nudibranchs but didn’t. Well, we did, but we didn’t know it until we looked at our pictures from the excursion and saw a pair of black and orange nudibranchs in a photo. So we’ll try again tomorrow morning when the tide is a little lower and look more carefully. We were in a bit of a hurry this morning as we needed to be ready to go with John Sheppard at 11 am to the dedication celebration for the Hotel Loharano (Tsyazo Idriana Ato). The temporary sign on the beach said all of this but we are thinking that Loharano is the name of the hotel and the rest was a greeting. It’s pretty bad when you don’t even know where you have been! We met the owners, Isaletto and Alberto (I hope I have the spelling correct, but please forgive if I do not.) at yesterday’s Rotary meeting and were graciously invited to today’s celebration. We rode in John’s boat across to Nosy Be and because of low tide, once again had to get out and wade for a bit and then walk down the beach to the hotel. It has been open for a couple of months but today was the grand opening. We entered the hotel grounds and immediately saw Joanna and Wendy that we met yesterday. They were wrapped in African-looking cloth and Joanna yelled across to us that we must go to the office to get our wrap. It was all part of the celebration, so the men wore their wraps from the waist down and women wore the material as a sarong with a second piece of material over the shoulder. The hotel has an African feel to it. The bungalows are bright orange with circular thatched roofs. There was a beautiful pool with a slide down the hill to yet another pool. The staff was busy cooking and a band was playing as we walked through the hotel grounds and back out to a knoll overlooking the beach. We sat at a table with many of the Rotary members we met yesterday and we met other hotel owners from Sakatia and the stretch of Nosy Be facing Nosy Sakatia. We ate, drank, and were merry. The whole affair was lovely. When it was time for us to leave I went to say thank you to Isaletta and Alberto. I don’t know if it is the Italian way or the Malagasy way, but my thank you was over-shadowed by Isaletto’s graciousness. She expressed how honored she was that we could be them on this very special occasion. Mark and I walked down the beach to where John’s boat would pick us up and take us back to Windbird feeling like very lucky people. John has introduced us to a wonderful community of people here and we are so much richer for our encounters here.
